Turn The Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers Into Leaders

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Most people unconsciously divide the world into leaders vs followers, and make assumptions about what each group can/can’t do. Such assumptions influence our thoughts and actions to impact the performance of individual employees and the organization. Over time, Marquet and his officers came up with 20 “mechanisms” (Navy terminology for methods practices) to transform Santa Fe from a leader-follower to a leader-leader organization. The mechanisms focused on three key areas:

Control, we discovered, only works with a competent workforce that understands the organization’s purpose. Hence, as control is divested, both technical competence and organizational clarity need to be strengthened” We’ve already learned a thing or two about leadership from some the past greats, such as Lincoln and Washington. And we went over the 21 laws of leadership. You see, today’s leaders are not much different than the ones who managed the building of the pyramids or the Industrial Revolution. In fact, a pharaoh might do just as good as a company CEO today. The problem is that this good is not good enough. Since Turn the Ship Around! was published in 2013, hundreds of thousands of readers have been inspired by former Navy captain David Marquet’s true story. Many have applied his insights to their own organizations, creating workplaces where everyone takes responsibility for his or her actions, where followers grow to become leaders, and where happier teams drive dramatically better results. What? Yet another book on leadership, filled with generic statements focused on WHAT (which is quite straightforward) instead of HOW (the hard part ...)? Not really, not this time.Whether you need a major change of course or just a tweak of the rudder, you can apply Marquet’s methods to turn your own ship around. But, “Turn the Ship Around” is a bit different. It’s even more democratic than “ The Leaders We Need.”

With the holiday decision an obvious concern of the change in approach was that a sailor’s immediate supervisor might not know the overall context in granting leave (say, was an inspection coming up that might require all hands) but the solution to that is to push that context down. Indeed my biggest take away from the book is the need to cascade context, to push information down that people need to make good decisions, and then let the decisions come up, rather than the other way round.No matter your business or position, you can apply Marquet's radical guidelines to turn your own ship around. The payoff: a workplace where everyone around you is taking responsibility for their actions, where people are healthier and happier, where everyone is a leader. Before long, each member of Marquet's crew became a leader and assumed responsibility for everything he did, from clerical tasks to crucial combat decisions. The crew became fully engaged, contributing their full intellectual capacity every day, and the Santa Fe started winning awards and promoting a highly disproportionate number of officers to submarine command. In short, a revolutionary book about leaders who want to disrupt the leader-follower paradigm by learning about the benefits from an unconventional source: The US Navy. About L. David Marquet Within a year of taking over command of Santa Fe, he had turned the ship around with a marked improvement in performance, a huge jump in enlistments and retention and crew members were visibly advancing in their careers. To incorporate the 3 sets of mechanisms above into your organization:

When he assumed command, Marquet’s goal was to create a leader-leader structure by pushing control—the authority to decide what to do and how—downward to the officers and crew. The rating is for the book, not the content. The ideas and concepts the book brings up are quite interesting and sound like they would be quite useful to many organisations. However, it's written in a simplistic structure that came off cheesy and often annoying. The writing, in general, was amateurish and the narrator for the audiobook (who happened to be the author as well) did a pretty horrible job. The feeling I got from the whole experience was that the author managed to get some success with a new leadership methodology and let that success get to his head. Enhance opportunities for informal communication - encourage team members to think out loud as a mechanism for control and organizational clarity. Will this book shake your world? In my case, it didn't, but as it's a nice set of R-L cases, it's truly educative & I believe it has provided my some additional input to "digest" intellectually.The typical leader-follower structure is designed to push information up the chain of command to the people who make the decisions. In contrast, Marquet pushed control down to where the information originated. Brave Leaders understand that mistakes are helpful in learning what proper procedures should be implemented. When the performance of a unit goes down after an officer leaves, it is taken as a sign that he was a good leader, not that he was ineffective in training his people properly.”